Current Residents

PhotoAccess is thrilled to announce that Sydney based artist Emilio Cresciani has been awarded the 2020 Dark Matter Residency.

PhotoAccess Director Kirsten Wehner said ‘Here at PhotoAccess, we’re interested in asking’ ‘What is contemporary photography?’ ‘What does a contemporary photographic practice look like?’ Cresciani’s practice investigates the effects of climate change through experimental darkroom based photographic processes.

‘PhotoAccess is a unique space for making, sharing and discovering creative photography and photo-based art. We’re a place where audiences can gather to explore how contemporary image-making shapes our world. I am thrilled to be welcoming Cresciani to PhotoAccess and together with my team, we look forward to introducing him to our Members and the wider photographic and arts community.

Emilio Cresciani is an artist and freelance photographer and lives and works in Sydney, Australia. He graduated from Sydney College of the Arts in 2012.

He won the 2018 Dis-Moi Dix Mots Competition, Alliance Française Sydney. In 2020 he received an Honourable Mention in the international Monochrome Awards and was a finalist in the Mandorla Art Prize; in 2019 he was a finalist in the Bowness Photography Prize, Olive Cotton Award and a Semi Finalist, Head On Portrait Prize. He was a finalist in the 2018 Mandorla Art Prize; 2017 Bowness Photography Prize. He received a 2017 PhotoAccess Canberra Artist Support Package; in 2015 was a finalist in the Chippendale New World Art Prize and the Agendo Art Prize, the 2010 National Youth Self Portrait Prize at the National Portrait Gallery in Australia and his work was featured in the People Gallery, National Geographic Magazine Photo Contest in 2010.

His artwork explores redundancy and urban change. His interest is in objects, structures, buildings and the urban landscape, and in particular the increasing number of ‘non-places’ that fill our environment. Waste centres, derelict service stations, road works, car parks and abandoned factories. Beauty is found in these places of repulsion, neglect or obsolescence. Inverted images of rubbish emphasise the negative side of consumerism, like an x-ray points out disease. Portraits of people with their weekly waste explored Italo Calvino’s suggestion that we are defined by what we dump. Cracked car windows and night road works are a metaphor for the central place roads play in capitalism.